Description

The conference will be held on March 19, 2016 on the campus of Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio.

Americans love sports. An estimated 35 to 50 million American youth play organized sports, the Super Bowl regularly attracts over 160 million viewers, and sports figures are among America’s most recognized celebrities.

Yet on the heels of recent media attention to concussions in football and domestic violence in the NFL, there is currently great interest among coaches and athletes at all levels, as well as many others, to come to practical terms with violence associated with competitive contact sports. There are, moreover, questions about the relationship between sports violence and other habits and behaviors among athletes and spectators, the formation of virtue in sports, moral education in sports, and the intersection of sports, gender, and violence.

In some cases, sports function to inculcate virtue and channel aggression as an alternative to conflict. This analogy, following some theorists, holds true within spectators as well, who through their support of the aggression on the field cathartically direct their passion into their support of the game.

These positive effects stand alongside other descriptions of sports as producing “casualties of war” such as injured (especially concussed) players with a determination to “play through it,” often leading to long-term effects for the players. By investigating the complex relationship between sports and violence at multiple levels (athlete, fan, society) and from a variety of different angles (sociological, historical, practical, medical), the 2016 Ashland Center for Nonviolence Sports and Violence conference seeks to advance important and timely conversations in an interdisciplinary fashion that will appeal to a broad range of groups.